You haven’t seen her in over a year, not since that Labor Day weekend you took her up to your family’s lake house and she got so pissed at you for shooting up right away. “Danny, I was serious,” she said, like you were supposed to know that. But how the hell could you tell she was serious this time when she’d never been serious before . . . ?
We arrived around three a.m. and banged on the door, which swung open. The tiny white apartment was filled with pasty-faced, sweating people, hopping and hollering to a harrowing type of Dutch hardcore techno that thumped angrily through the speakers . . .
After writing a suicide letter addressed to her fiancé, Sophie tooted three fat lines of heroin, then downed some pills just to make sure . . .
Flies pepper the window of my Fort Benning barracks room. I stun them with pine-scented Glade. With each spray they drop—well, like flies . . .
Harry glances around the room, the trim freshly painted. Someone with money owns the place. Maybe Christiane’s family.
“Does anyone live here?” Harry asks.
Gem sneers at this pretense of familiarity.
“You ask too many questions, man . . .”
I didn’t know he was hooked on smack when I moved in. That confession came two nights later . . .
We’re in the elevator and Jancy is climbing up the metal wall, using my knee as a stepladder. “Look Mom, I’m rappelling,” she says, bouncing up and down on my thigh.
I want to yell at her but I need her like this . . .
I met her at work. I was five years younger than her, and shy. She always smiled, was loud and outspoken . . .